Administration is the key(bunch)

Through this post I intend to shout out to all admins in the community (and elsewhere). Admin is really like the key-bunch which could unlock/lock and maintain all the goodies Marketo has to offer.

Like every other component, once in a while we do need provide healing touches to the segments which hasn't been working so well. Also, the ones that are working well could use a performance boost. So, here's what I'd want to know from you:

What according to you is the single most disliked feature of admin?

What is the most used functionality of admin for you?

Are there any commonly used workarounds which you'd like admin to cater for?

If we were to provide an export feature of configurations, what details would you like in that "data take-out"?

Any thoughts/comments/feedback/criticism (positive or negative) revolving around Admin are greatly welcomed. Please feel free to reach out to me to discuss some of the ideas you may have.

1. Salesforce integration is the section I dislike the most. You can edit some basic sync options, and see a timestamp of the last sync and whether or not it's in progress, but it gives very little other visibility, and that makes admin'ing the integration difficult. Would be great if some of the information (object schemas, field visibility and field types, sync logs) were available to admin users through non-secret and supported methods. It would be great to see a log of the sync cycle - how many records of a given object synced to and from Salesforce, how many were new, updated, a count of the how many records are pending sync for each object. An error log too please! FYI - I used to work in Marketo Support and I know that all of this information is already available to them, and simply needs some work to make it presentable and supportable for users. In my opinion, it would also deflect a lot of their cases related to the Salesforce integration.It would also be fantastic to have a "Field Mapping" tab where we can change the field mapping between Marketo and Salesforce on our own without having to go through Support. Additionally, it would be great if fields did not automatically sync down to Marketo simply because the sync user can see them - if the fields simply became available for sync in this hypothetical "Field Mapping" tab, it would help us tremendously with keeping our fields clean, giving us control rather than being at the mercy of our SFDC admins remembering to follow processes around permissions.

2. Field Management is the most used. For an agile team, there is constant change coming downstream from Salesforce. We have to adapt quickly to process changes in CRM by making sure new fields are synced properly and finding where old fields are in use to make sure there are no dependent processes. It would be really nice if we could (1) delete old fields rather than hiding them, (2) relabel fields even though they are in use. Our instance is 10 years old, and we have an enormous list of hidden fields.Also, when removing a field from assets, we find the field in Field Management and look at the Used By list - but the assets there aren't clickable links, which makes it even more painful trying to remove references to the field.

3. I think I covered this in #1 and #24. I'm not sure how I would apply an export feature of admin configurations. If other people have use cases for that I'd be curious.

Those are some excellent points that you've mentioned. I can see that your support days have served you well in getting a good hands-on to Admin, and Marketo in general.

On Salesforce Integration, I can totally relate to what you've mentioned. Displaying more details on the sync - last sync timestamp, in-progress percentage and also sync (error/success) logs would indeed add value to our customers. On the Field Mapping, definitely there's some scope for enhancements, providing some options to manually map fields and to control sync manually/semi automated ways (needs more thought process from my side around this).

In Field Management, I need to dig around on permanent deletion. I feel that it's best suited for a backend process to have them cleared from the system, but then I could be wrong.

Renaming fields sounds more doable though.

While removing fields from assets, I did find the assets clickable, which leads to detail pages. Nonetheless a seamless way of handling this, without leaving Admin could be a cooler approach, in my opinion. We could discuss more if you have some time.

Thanks again for taking time to jot these items down. It helped me in validating my opinions.

Thanks Vikram! Yes, regarding the Used By list for a field, they are clickable, but are not regular hyperlinks so we can't open them in a separate tab. If I need to adapt to a major process change, we could be talking about hundreds of assets that I need to remove the field from before I can hide the field.

Hi Vikram, I totally echo Grants points here both about Salesforce sync and Field admin as we also have a very old instance and have been through a lot of rounds of having to remove fields from hundreds of assets one by one before being able to rename or hide this field. I am ok with keeping api name the same just like Salesforces does but we sometimes need to be able to rename the friendly label for the users as some fields don't make sense at all. Also if you want to do an audit of which fields have what setting, what the field is blocked from and if it's synced to salesforce you can export one list. The field list export only gives the field names and API names. If there could be added columns for all the settings that would be great!

Our SFDC Admin sometimes renames the friendly label of a field, and then it has a different name in Marketo, which can be really confusing. They changed "Lead Status Reason" to "Closed Status Reason" and I have to think about which is the "real" (SFDC) name when talking to people or writing documentation.

Audit trail is really an unfriendly UI. It's very clunky, it's hard to pick from the dropdowns, and it's often hard to decipher what actually changed.

My #1 issue is that Field details can only be seen by Admins! I have plenty of people doing building (consultants, email marketers) who occasionally want to look at fields to see what SFDC fields they're synced to, what type they are, where they're used, etc., but they can't because it's only available to Admins! It's also frustrating that "field mapping" tab doesn't update after initial integration. Also agree with above on renaming and deleting fields.

I would love for there to be a real-time Notification if an API connection breaks in LaunchPoint. I make it a point to check Launchpoint every day because there is one particular connection (GoToWebinar) that has been unstable, and I only find out when there is a flood of registration errors.

I am happy to get on a call to do a deep dive with you to discuss more!

On the Audit Trail, I need to do some homework. It'd involve some of our UX engineers to help me with some designs. In the meantime, I would like to know more if you have some pointers.

On sharing the Field Mapping information, I think we could come up with something where information could be shared securely with people on a need-to-know basis. On LaunchPoint, I need more details on the type of notification that you'd like to receive. And also, is GoToWebinar the only service that breaks frequently or other ones too?

I am eager to discuss more on these topics. Please let me know when is the best time and means to reach out to you.

Audit Trail: It's hard to articulate the frustrations with Audit Trail. I recommend logging into an instance's Audit Trail and try to pull some reports. I don't think it needs a complete design overhaul, probably just fixing some bugs in the way picklists are displayed and how it scales/resizes/etc.

Launchpoint: GoToWebinar is the only one that breaks frequently, but when it does, it's a disaster. However I don't believe there is a notification for service expirations (e.g. LinkedIn Lead Gen needs to be authenticated after a year), which would be very helpful.

I will "follow" you, follow me back and I can give you my email address to schedule a meeting.

I made a special role that only includes Field Management and gave it to a couple of users, with very specific instructions not to edit anything. But View Field Management v. Edit Field Management permission would be nice to have.

I recently had a customer research call with Marketo and brought up a request for a feature that could be added to the admin area. I think we need an instance analyzer which can provide a summary with key stats all in one place. It would be something targeted towards admins, or superusers, who inherit an instance when joining a company, but also useful for those managing it over time. Some ideas for what this could include....

1) A quick overview of the total # of contacts in the database which provides splits by marketable/unmarketable, country/region, SFDC lead/contact, customized segments, and customizable for other existing fields/tags in the database. It would also be helpful to see dormant vs engaged contacts for each region (i.e. how many have activity in the last 3/6/12 months vs those who are not active).

2) An overview of the most active internal users.

3) A way to see key average email performance stats for the whole account (open rate, click rate, click to open rate, hard bounce, soft bounce, unsubscribe rate), and the ability to segment these averages by country or region.

4) Similar to above, but for landing pages...what are the most viewed LPs, what is the average conversion rate for forms (with option to create an average by selecting specific LPs to crunch data on).

There are third-party tools that can do this, but I would love to have the ability to communicate with our users within Marketo - an announcement/notification feature of sorts.

This likely falls outside of the Admin section, but it would be great to have a smart list filter for "Marketo users" that would allow me to easily distribute emails to the active users in our account.

It would be helpful to have a "view as" feature to test user roles and troubleshoot permissions issues.